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I must have missed this while avoiding the interwebs around April Fool’s Day, but apparently Visual Studio Code is no longer beta/preview, and has hit their 1.0 version milestone.

UPDATE: I was confused when reading the update log, which had the 1.0.0 update listed as March 2016…this must’ve been referring to the preview 1.0 release. Thus the correction above. The official public 1.0 release was yesterday, so I didn’t miss it after all. Details below the fold…

Node.js may not be the “new” hotness, but it’s still pretty hot, and getting hotter all the time. Whether you’re a .NET developer who’s still on the fence about JavaScript, or just haven’t gotten around to taking a look at Node, now is a pretty good time to do so, and in this post, I’ll show you a nice combination of tools that make learning Node easy and fun, namely nodeschool.io and the new Visual Studio Code editor.

What is Node.js?

On the off chance that you’ve found your way here, but don’t know what Node.js is, Node.js (sometimes referred to simply as Node) is an execution environment for JavaScript code, based on the V8 JavaScript runtime from Chrome. It’s designed to be fast, lightweight, and efficient. You can use node to write server applications in JavaScript, from real-time chat apps, to web APIs, to full web applications. While Node itself is pretty simple, with a [limited, but want another word] API set, it ships with NPM, the node package manager, which provides a fast and easy way to install packages, which are collections of functionality wrapped up in such a way as to make them easy to add to your Node projects. Node packages are available to facilitate all kinds of applications, including MVC-style routing engines, template engines, unit testing and more.